Amazing stuff!
"The James Webb Space Telescope has found a lonely black hole in the early universe that’s as heavy as 50 million suns. A major discovery, the object confounds theories of the young cosmos." (Source)
From the abstract:
"Recent discoveries of faint active galactic nuclei (AGN) at the redshift frontier have revealed a plethora of broad \Halpha emitters with optically red continua, named Little Red Dots (LRDs), which comprise 15-30% of the high redshift broad line AGN population.
Due to their peculiar spectral properties and X-ray weakness, modeling LRDs with standard AGN templates has proven challenging. In particular, the validity of single-epoch virial mass estimates in determining the black hole (BH) masses of LRDs has been called into question, with some models claiming that masses might be overestimated by up to 2 orders of magnitude, and other models claiming that LRDs may be entirely stellar in nature.
We report the direct, dynamical BH mass measurement in a strongly lensed LRD at . The combination of lensing with deep spectroscopic data reveals a rotation curve that is inconsistent with a nuclear star cluster, yet can be well explained by Keplerian rotation around a point mass of 50 million Solar masses, consistent with virial BH mass estimates from the Balmer lines. The Keplerian rotation leaves little room for any stellar component in a host galaxy, as we conservatively infer . Such a ''naked'' black hole, together with its near-pristine environment, indicates that this LRD is a massive black hole seed caught in its earliest accretion phase."
More than 300 “little red dots” have been seen so far — mysterious objects in the early universe that look like big, glowing black holes in some ways and unusual galaxies in others.
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